QNAP TS-219P+ Turbo NAS Review. Page 5

Today we are going to talk about QNAP's new generation two-bay Turbo NAS with iSCSI, especially designed for small business and home users who are looking for a large storage center. This solution supports RAID 1, offers hot-swappable hard disk design, features two eSATA and multiple USB ports.

External Devices

The TS-219P+ has broad connectivity options that surpass what same-class NASes usually offer. Besides three USB 2.0 ports, it has a couple of eSATA connectors, so you can significantly increase the size of storage. However, the eSATA ports are implemented via a separate controller chip, which may affect their speed, whereas disks connected to them cannot be enrolled into RAID arrays.

The USB ports can be used for external disks, printers, UPSes and Wi-Fi adapters. Each partition on an external disk is represented as an individual network folder. The administrator can change its access rights, which may be useful if the external disk is attached on a permanent basis. The TS-219P+ supports a wide range of file systems on external disks (EXT3, EXT4, NTFS, FAT32, HFS+) and can write to them and even format them.

The front-panel USB port has a special copy button whose action is set up in the web-interface: copying data from the connected USB disk to a specified shared folder or from a shared folder to the USB disk.

A USB printer you may connect to the NAS will support unidirectional access only, so you will hardly be able even to learn its status via the network. Printer access can be restricted basing on the client’s IP address.

If you’ve got a compatible UPS, the NAS can safely shut down after a power failure. If you’ve got one UPS for several NASes, the NASes can share it using a client-server scenario.

The single problem we can find in the current firmware from QNAP is that it does not support USB hubs.

System Settings

The NAS has standard options for updating and saving its firmware and restoring or resetting its configuration. It can check out for firmware updates automatically and notify the administrator about them.

There is an integrated calendar and clock that can be synced with online time servers.

An event log is a kind of service that needs to know what time it is. Besides an ordinary system log, the TS-219P+ can record user actions performed via different protocols including HTTP, FTP, SSH, SMB, etc. If necessary, event notifications can be sent to a syslog server. Email and SMS notifications can also be sent to the administrator. You can enable authentication and SSL/TLS support in the SMTP server parameters. SMS notifications require a subscription to a paid service.

The new hardware platform provides enhanced power management options including Wake-on-LAN and an operation schedule. The schedule can turn the NAS on and off and reboot it with an accuracy up to a minute.

The page with hardware options is where you can allow the hard disks to be shut down after a period of inactivity, block the Reset button or disable the sound signal. There are a few settings related to the cooling fan. You can even specify your own temperature thresholds for the fan to change its speed.

The web-interface has three pages with monitoring options. The first page is about the hardware components: firmware version, network interface, processor and memory usage, system and disk temperature. The second page shows the status of each service and protocol. And the third page displays dynamic usage graphs for the processor, network interface and system memory and also lists the currently running processes.